AC Library Featured Reads
May is National Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and the AC Library has some great displays to celebrate authors and people of the AAPI community. Check out this month's features:
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.
We Too Sing America by Deepa Iyer
In the American Book Award–winning We Too Sing America, nationally renowned activist Deepa Iyer shows that this is the latest in a series of recent racial flash points, from the 2012 massacre at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the violent opposition to the Islamic Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and to the Park 51 Community Center in Lower Manhattan.
Iyer asks whether hate crimes should be considered domestic terrorism and explores the role of the state in perpetuating racism through detentions, national registration programs, police profiling, and constant surveillance. Reframing the discussion of race in America, she “reaches into the complexities of the many cultures that make up South Asia” (Publishers Weekly) and provides ideas from the front lines of post-9/11 America.
Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women Edited by Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura
Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond.
This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States.
Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women’s and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories.
Transformative Practices for Minority Student Success Edited by Dina C. Maramba and Timothy P. Fong
This book, the first to focus wholly on Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Institutions (AANAPISIs) and their students, offers a corrective to misconceptions about these populations and documents student services and leadership programs, innovative pedagogies, models of community engagement, and collaborations across academic and student affairs that have transformed student outcomes. The contributors stress the importance of disaggregating this population that is composed of over 40 ethnic groups that vary in immigrant histories, languages, religion, educational attainment levels, and socioeconomic status.
It also serves as an important resource for predominantly white institutions who are admitting greater numbers of API and other underrepresented students. It offers models for other minority serving institutions who face similar complexities of multiple national or ethnic groups within their populations, provides ideas and inspiration for the AANAPISI community, and guidance for institutions considering applying for AANAPISI status and funding.
Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang (available in e-book format through the AC Library)
Babel is a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he'll enroll in Oxford University's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation--also known as Babel.
Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working--the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars--has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire's quest for colonization.
For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide...
Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?
Inspiring Figures to Celebrate for AAPI Heritage Month
The AC Library has a wonderful display set up to share information about famous people from the AAPI community. To learn more about the amazing people listed below, please visit the display.
- Kaplana Chawla - First woman of Indian descent to go to space
- Yuri Kochiyama - A Japanese-American activist
- Queen Lili'uokalani - First and only queen of the Kingdom of Hawai'i
- Dr. Haing S. Ngor - A Cambodian surgeon, activist, and actor
- Haunani-Kay Trask - A historian, human rights activist, and professor
- Sombath Somphone - A Lao community developer and activist
- Anna May Wong - First Asian-American movie star
- Larry Itliong - A Filipino-American labor activist
